Their old self peeking through

I noticed a strange looking cord when unpacking my Power Mac G5 at work this week, at one end it had a standard USB adapter, but the other end had a female connector. It looked like a USB extension cable, so I thought “cool, I'll hook it to the mouse so I won't have tie the mouse to the keyboard”

Except the mouse wouldn't fit into the female end of the cord. Then I tried the old 'plug an extension cable into itself' trick, and that wouldn't work either. So I was at a loss to figure out what this thing is supposed to be for.

Turns out Apple's keyboard USB cable is shaped slightly differently than the standard size. Just different enough so that only it will fit into the USB extension cable they ship with their G5s. Heaven forbid you might want to use it to make a printer cable reach across a desk. Now, this still puts them above the rest of the computer industry who wouldn't ever consider supplying something beyond the absolute bare minimum required to get the computer running. I'm just perplexed that they would go through the trouble of creating a customized connector just to frustrate their users.

Old habits die hard, I guess :)
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